When is a target not a target? When it looks unlikely you’ll hit it. To soothe worried markets and restore faith in the UK’s finances, George Osborne, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, promised in 2010 that the country’s structural deficit would be eradicated and that total government debt would be falling within five years. But, with revenues weaker than predicted and the budget deficit bigger, those are both looking like increasingly forlorn hopes.

What to do? The advice from a number of corners is to simply forget about the targets. It would be madness, some argue, to squeeze the economy harder - through further tax increases, spending cuts or both - merely to hit a more or less arbitrary goal that was conceived to a political timetable (five years being, not coincidentally, the maximum length of a parliament in the UK).